From warehouse inventory to health and safety compliance to running entire factories, app tech is all over the manufacturing and engineering space. Digital transformation firm Capgemini recently surveyed 1,000 senior executives from global manufacturing organizations across nine countries, 62% of who had global revenues greater than $2 billion. The report…

Throughout his period as Chancellor, Philip Hammond has repeatedly emphasised the UK’s “productivity puzzle”. It’s a catchy name for the UK’s stagnant productivity growth since the ‘08 financial crisis. The UK’s productivity growth has plateaued at 2%. It’s not a decline, sure. But the stalling of productivity growth is probably…

Apps have a reputation problem. Mention the word ‘app’ to most people, and they’ll immediately think of Angry Birds, Instagram and Citymapper. What they won’t imagine are major engineering projects and complex machinery speaking to operators via the Internet of Things. Yet this is exactly where many of the most…

The fourth Industrial Revolution is here. AI, AR, Machine learning, the IIoT – each, in its own way, promises to change the way businesses of all stripes work. The companies of 10 years’ time will be unrecognisable from those of today. Alongside these precursors to a utopic ‘smart’ future, however,…

You may or may not have heard of the Chinese game, Go. All you need to know is that it’s the most complicated game on earth: there are more possible moves in a game of Go than there are atoms in the universe. And in May 2017, Google’s AlphaGo artificial…

“Manufacturing is more than just putting parts together”, says British industrial engineer Sir James Dyson. “It’s coming up with ideas, testing principles and perfecting the engineering, as well as final assembly.” When it comes to these three key pillars of engineering design, few innovations have proved as revolutionary as The…

Think about special effects in blockbuster Hollywood movies and your mind will likely stray to a big dumb action movie like Transformers or the Avengers. And with good reason. Films like these are linked with SFX because, simply, they’re so visible. They’re loud, brash and in your face, and the…

The next time you walk down your local high street, take a good look at what’s going on around you. Are there empty shops – and how long have they been empty? Has the choice of retailers changed in recent years? And what’s the footfall like compared with before? According…

This is the second part in our series focusing on how the Internet of Things is being applied in various industries – you can read part 1, on healthcare, here. When Hong Kong’s Kowloon Hotel first opened in 1986, it was the world’s first true “technology hotel”. The rooms…

The Internet of Things promises us a world where billions of devices talk to each other, constantly adjusting and responding to the data they send and receive. It’s a world where you can turn your TV on with the wave of a hand or set your alarm clock by talking…

Internet of Things: stats and facts The term ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT) was coined in 1999 by Kevin Ashton to describe a wireless network that connects devices and objects remotely. Almost 20 years on, 87% of consumers still don’t understand what IoT actually is – we hope to make things…

Back in 2006, the media got quite excited about a piece of software from an American virtual experience company called Linden Labs. Second Life was their new product, and this, we were told, was the future – a virtual world where everyone could escape the drudgery of their ‘first life’…